lucky find gazette o o
 
 
in styles geared for minis to maxis or the widest of pants.” ...so cried the shoe page of the MONTGOMERY WARD CATALOG, 1970 We picked up this gem at a junk store, along with a (way less far-out) Sears catalog of the same year, on a driving trip up the Great River Road from St. Louis to Quad Cities. Supposedly to see the fall colors, but mostly just to seek out Lucky Finds. Can you name all four Quad Cities? Hint: the John Deere factory is in one of them. Okay, okay: Moline and Rock Island, Illinois, plus Davenport and Bettendorf, Iowa. And I wouldn’t call them cities. All 4 equal 1 town. Buster came up with some song lyrics that started out, “Quad City woman…” sung in husky tremolo, but no further words would come to him. It’s not an inspiring place, although they’ve got good junk, as these catalog pages prove. 1970 was definitely the year of vinyl, or as Ward’s marketed it, “crinkle patent.” I had brown crinkle patent side buckle shoes and a maraschino red crinkle patent vest (with fringe), though my mom bought these slick fashions at Korvette’s, not from a catalog. You actually wore this stuff? I did! I wore the brown buckle shoes with an orange polyester double-knit plaid bell-bottomed pantsuit. The jacket had a “dog-ear” collar. Don’t ask! The red vest was worn with a puff-sleeved mini dress with cherries all over it. Ouch! Other items in the book too scary to scan: a whole page of fondue pots, metal kitchen cabinets in the all pervasive avocado green, vinyl tablecloths and flooring in eye-popping florals, bedspreads in the most God-awful “Mediterranean” and op-art styles imaginable. The seventies are full of painful memories for anyone who spent any time there. Look at the items in old catalogs of the time and wonder what it was like to wake up daily to all that Bad Taste. Not nice!    Very Bad Taste Indeed!
Page Three, Issue One
“Shine, baby, in colors that glisten with slick wet looks...